Black and Blue
by springandbysummerfall
Summary: Left to rot in a prison cell, even the forgotten Saiyan Prince's future seems bleak as he descends into darkness and lunacy- -that is, until a damnably energetic woman is tossed into the cell beside him. Despite his incurable despair and her dwindling optimism, they depend on the other as they plan a seemingly ill-fated escape. Short four-parter. For the Contradictions Challenge.
1. Black and Blue

When they drug her in all black and blue and tossed her into the adjacent cell, her body hitting the floor with a meaty thump and her cheek burning across the wet cement, he rolled his eyes and curled deeper into the wall.

Even as the guards, rough and tumble and with blackened teeth jutting from uneven sneers, even as they laughed their hard laughs and ran their cretinous, coarse fingers through his newest neighbor's hair to hang her and shake her like a marionette, her eyes watering with the exquisitely dumb pain before they swatted her back by her shoulder like play yard bullies, even still, she was shoving herself back up with shaky arms and spitting curses.

"I'll see you in Hell!" She was yelling, blasting toward the doorway in a flurry of feet and disoriented swaying and banging her palms against the metal door even as they shut it firmly in her face. "You'll pay!" She walloped the door with her small fist. "You'll pay for cutting my hair!"

Her frustrated shriek bounced around in this hollow, dank prison and ricocheted inside his head, causing his impassive features to drop their usual pretext of indifference and collapse into a heavy scowl, his ears throbbing in protest. This near-lightless toilet of Frieza's ship, cells queued one after the other after the other after the other that ended abruptly with his cell just like their lives ended abruptly once thrown in here. Even his sharp preservation instincts and the tenets of his dogged warrior's training were decaying in the dark down here, the mildew setting up camp in his lungs, the hopelessness that he'd fortified himself against for years finding purchase in his heart. He was a machine honed by culture and genetics, and even he leaned against the cold wall and breathed in the damp air, faintly wheezing, and thought that it might be meaningless to fight back.

"Ugh!" She kicked the door as hard as she could before yowling and hopping around on one foot with pain. Vegeta watched her from the corner of his eyes inside the shadows of his cell.

She paced around indignantly before settling against the wall with a huff, folding in on herself, her arms crossing atop her knees. The only sound in the thick silence of this prison for turncoats was the drip drip drip of some leak ignored, the soundtrack to the last year of his life, a moribund arpeggio which didn't last long before the woman shot up to pace again. So far, her song and dance.

He'd give her a week. This was the place dissenters were sent to rot.

He sniffed and turned his head toward the wall, black and empty, his mirror's reflection in which he focused day in day out, braiding dark thoughts and malevolent plans without egress or interruption. Cathartic fantasies of spilled blood and spoiled crowning-ceremonies, revenge and rampage heating his blood with a however-diminishing lust for life. His chains clanked against each other despite the small movement, and she turned, then, toward him and his cell, peering past the thick bars and into the darkness to spy a shadow lingering.

"Hello?" She called. Her voice trembled with a mixture of anger and fear, and he leaned his heavy head against the stone with an ascetic's self flagellating pride.

She crawled then, all fours and tenderly, her hands and knees scraped up from her treatment by the guards, before placing her head against the bars that separated them irreverently. His mind skipped around thoughtlessly, probably fading in and out of awareness with hunger.

"What are you in for?" Her soft, feminine voice shimmied past the bars and ribboned towards him, settling uncomfortably on his hunched shoulders.

Her almost maternal inquisitiveness seemed so out of place that he turned toward it dumbfounded, halfway between insult and laughter, just in time to see her hair slide across her cheek, cup her chin and obscure her face. Even in the dim glow of their cells he could see that they'd given her the typical prisoner's shave but left it half done to taunt her vanity, the locks choppy and uneven and hardly effeminate. She looked at him with a measure of commiseration and curiosity, unknowingly painting a stark vision, her eyes and hair so vibrant against the prison bars and brackish light of their cells. He moved towards her sleekly. Her bright features seemed so wild against the motley black and blue bruises on her face and it seemed so funny that she would bother bringing them here.

"Hello?" Her voice like a skylark climbing the buffeting wind, smoothing down the broken things, and as far as his chains allowed he leaned his face toward her own panicked visage growing rapidly close before the chain length abruptly ended and jerked him to a halt just before the bars.

As bleak and incisive as a nightmare he was, and his lean muscles stretched as he neared her trembling lip ruby with someone else's fist, and it was startling, like looking in a mirror when she peered upward from underneath loosely knitted eyebrows with grim defiance, trying to focus on his features through the darkness.

For a moment, he leaned his head against the bars, and her breath caught as silently their hair curled against the other's, glaring blue against black like silk strands caught against burrs brought home as a child from trampling through wild grasses. She saw only the curve of a bronze shoulder and an oft-darned, loose shirt hanging off it, and his hair lying against it, weighted down and unwashed, surprisingly unfamiliar to him, and he glared at her in the darkness before turning away.

Turning away from her ultramarines and sea greens, distinctive and alien juxtaposed against the barren whites and rusty reds of his desert world, turning away from the siren's call of her energy and audacity and drifting back into the black, the harsh and withering black paint strokes all over his cell and his heart, over his once gutsy contempt and defiance of the annexation of his home world to Frieza's icy clutches, where he waited in an empty hum for all this to end.

Sensing his reluctance to speak, she sat her back against the wall and sighed, glancing now and again into the shadows where he lurked, silent, the phantom of a people all but extinct.

He gave her a week.


	2. Trading Sins For Salvation

It was impossible to tell time down here in the dark, but one could try and measure it by the sins of the lives that moldered around him.

Away from the routine of Frieza's ship, away from the bosom of Frieza's barbed benevolence and into the deeps of his icy discipline, the guards traded shifts every six hours. Six shifts had come and gone, six shifts had teased the woman in the cell beside him until she was red with indignation. And so, when her door opened with all the familiar clangs of bolts sliding and bumping against metal, amid the familiar shouting of the guards as they dictated each action in real time as protocol called, the woman threw her empty lunch tray at the door that yawned open.

Curled in the corner, his bored, watchful eyes flickered between the two figures in the next cell with new and acute attention. Their identical surprise at her visitor quickly junctured as he growled mutely at her visitor with apoplectic violence and she jumped up and threw her arms around his waist.

Though he could bear to think of no similarities between them, excepting that they were like two retrograde planets orbiting Frieza's retribution through misfortune and happenstance, he and the woman finally shared a similar expression of shock: A Saiyajin, a veritable, living and breathing Saiyan, slid inside her cell, and no less of a Saiyajin than Turles.

"Turles!" Her chest heaved against the Saiyan's, and for the first time in so very long he felt a roiling anger settling in his throat.

Why was Turles not lost in space, drifting in exile and angst? The marauding twin of Bardock whose paltry qualms with selling sensitive Saiyan technology got him absconded from his family and his planet? His disloyalty and disinterest in Saiyan culture had been so very unSaiyan that his departure had left no one wounded.

He sniffed as though catching a terrible odor. His regard of the woman took a sudden nose dive.

She took a step back to regard the much taller Saiyan, clutching her hands together plaintively. "Please tell me Bardock is safe and sound. Please tell me I've been pardoned and we can leave this fiasco behind us."

"We don't have much time," Turles replied cautiously.

"What's going on? When are they going to let me out?" Her white pant suit was a sooty grey from making her home on the floor the last few days, and she crossed her arms testily over her chest. She tossed her head to the side with a small jerk to dislodge the single long lock of hair that still stubbornly clung to her cheeks. He observed Turles' deference of her with gut dropping fascination.

"I can't take much more of this," she argued. "I've got a crook in my neck from sleeping sitting up and I don't know how much longer I can go without a shower!"

"Relax, we're taking care of it. The negotiations are already taking place with Lord Zarbon. You'll be out in a few days, tops."

"A few days!?" She sighed, gazing at the ground with a sallow expression. He watched her waver. Three days without much other than crumbs would do that, though she was doing her best to hide it. "Oh, Kami, I hope that pickled rube hurries up with the paperwork. How is Bardock? Do they know yet of the extent of our plans? They must not if they are freeing me." She chuckled humorlessly.

Someone banged on the door. "Time's up, Saiyajin!" The door swung open and Turles backed away from her. "I'll be back. Not much longer now."

The guard leered at the woman from behind the Saiyan, and she brought her middle finger up stormily as Turles exited.

Once the door swung shut with a clang, the woman proceeded to pace.

Vegeta bristled with fresh indignation. The serenity he'd worked so hard to cultivate finally punctured.

Clearly, there was to be no peace for him until she was gone.

* * *

She hadn't stopped talking. First as words of encouragement to herself, but now he suspected she was blowing so much hot air to create a buoy against despair. A mellifluous thing, but temperamental, too- -he listened to it wax, cutting and full throated when the guards teased her, tossing bugs at her through the doors and laughing as she blustered, stomping and cursing them and their mothers and their wives. They shoved rodents through the tray slot and she shrieked kingdom come on them all before erupting into self immolating sobs. He'd watched her through bored, glassy eyes as she approached the rusted toilet with laughable fright before braving it enough to sit down.

"You better not sneak a peek, buddy," she snapped in his direction as pee trickled into the little ceramic basin and echoed in the corridor of cells. "Don't try any funny stuff with me."

He almost rolled his eyes.

He'd never had a cell mate spit and sputter the way she did, and he found her animation repulsive and her volume obnoxious. He wanted fiercely for her to lay down and die already.

Instead, she spoke to him.

* * *

Vegeta's gaze burned into her from the shadows.

They were headed towards the seventeenth shift.

She was recounting a story this time about a girl, a rabbit, and a looking glass.

As much as he wished her gone, she finally seemed to be wilting, lying on the floor on her back, staring up at the ceiling, affecting the cheeky timbre of the thing she called the Cheshire Cat, which had gradually been losing much of its impertinent wit and sparkle. He wasn't sure if she was losing hope or conserving energy. She lay there, no doubt hoping for her Saiyajin to bring her salvation even as the Queen ordered the execution of the hero of her story.

Although the guards had given up pestering and baiting her, they shoved scraps of food in only on occasion, and she'd wolfed down the unanticipated gruel and molded cheese almost instantly before settling on the floor near the bars and, instead of storytelling this time, sluggishly related her life out loud and to no one at all, of the woman that existed before the ambitions of Icejin Empirism.

He assumed she'd gotten used to her silent interlocutor, considered him harmless even, because she'd given up trying to snag a glance of him while he was shoveling his ration of food in his face that day or devolving into the strenuous body weight exercises he performed mindlessly each shift.

The dark was a punishment just for him; it was only within the first few shifts of his extended vacation here in the bowels of Frieza's ship that they had cut the power to the cell blocks when he'd killed his guards three shifts in a row and clapped him in ki-disabling irons to prevent anymore...electrical insurrections. They learned quickly that Saiyans didn't depends on guns and 'ki technology' to scare others. Frieza thought himself the only one in the whole universe who could split open a planet like a pumpkin while supine on his throne, until they'd finally met. Frieza's resentment was palpable: it tasted like day old gruel and actuated like choking panic with only mildewed stones and inky dark for comfort.

There was only much he or the woman could see or do, but he knew with strong conviction that he hated it every time a guard neared his door. Every time they narrated their work he hated their freedom, every time they scurried away from the tray slit like he might reach out and grab them.

But it must have been a rancorous mixture of hunger and leached hope which had seized her, because she had been talking to him for the last three shifts straight from beside the bars and it was working at his grim serenity like a thorn.

Although he listened. He did, curious if she'd talk about Turles and Bardock and the reason she was down here. And she did- -she peeled away the things that made her her like a slow strip tease each time she regaled the silence and darkness with a story, and each time she told one of the guards to fuck off and every time she detailed the way in which she'd organized an actual standing army rebellion against the Icejin Empire to the blackout silence around her- -he still couldn't believe it- -she, an anemic, entitled woman, capturing the attention of Saiyajins and Frieza himself- -it was a morsel as he remembered what made him, him.

Though her Alice was whiny and petulant as she tried navigating her way through a surreal and perilous Wonderland, she drew a deep understanding and power from those around her, and he began to feel the rusted, cobwebbed cogs of his mind grate against each other and try to ferret out some elusive, enigmatic answer that hung over all of this between them.

He didn't want her to stop talking.

* * *

The twenty second guard shift saw deliverance.

"A visitor for the little lady," the guards giggled, opening her door and scurrying back.

And with a swish of a braid and cape and the nauseating scent of peonies came Frieza's lackey Zarbon, looking every bit disgusted that it was happening as Vegeta felt at his sudden appearance.

Only with the most disciplined, objective control was he able to resist tearing through the bars that separated their cells and crushing the skull of Frieza's most favorite minion with his bare hands. He had promised Zarbon he would break every bone in his body the next time it was their fortune to meet, beginning with his toes and ending with the palate of his skull. _"There are 426 bones in the body of your first form and I am planning on crippling each and every one of them,"_ he had rasped as they drug him away from Frieza's brood for the last time, his limbs catching on the lifeless bodies of his captors as it took several men to transport him through the throne room. Ever while locking eyes with the Icejin Emperor, who regarded him with chilled, ruby eyes, lips thinned fractionally.

The hacking laughter that erupted out of him knew no second thoughts- -it scented Frieza's fear beneath his cruelty, and it was a scent that the predator in him would never disengage from. His bloodline called out for it in a chorus of hellish keening; retribution and justice reverberated in his skull and wove its way around the coil of his DNA.

"As much as it pains me to tell you this," Zarbon began, stripping his hands of his ivory white gloves, "you are not to see freedom ever again. Frieza bade me tell you," he sing songed, "so that I may regale him with the satisfaction of spectating the hope as it dims from your eyes." He gazed on the woman with disinterest as she rose to meet him.

With hitched breath, he waited for a signal from Zarbon that he knew Vegeta lingered beyond the bars of her cell, even some smug acknowledgment to justify the berserking he planned visiting on the two-faced right-hand of Winter and Darkness.

Instead, Zarbon made no move of acknowledgement toward him. He stood loosely in front of the woman's cell door and regarded her with severe distaste.

"What?" The woman balked. "What do you mean, I am-"

"You've been tried and convicted. For conspiring against the Icejin throne, you are sentenced to life here, in this...lovely...place you call residence." Zarbon's voice was soft, snotty, and never in a million years did he wish to visit patricide on another nobleman so badly.

"But Turles!-"

"You stupid wretch," came the thick and grinding, harrowing voice from a maw that had temporarily replaced Zarbon's own delicate, chiseled one, shuttering and trembling with a transformation barely halted. The woman froze, and all of the muscles in Vegeta's body tightened with anticipation. "Turles is the one who notified his Lord Frieza of your role in this treachery! Turles sold your rebellion for a position in Frieza's Elite Squad, you insufferable peasant."

"But he was my friend," she muttered rapidly in shock, though her eyes already betrayed her better wisdom. Vegeta turned his head away.

"Better you learn here that friendship is a nursery tale," the thing spat in her face, breath as pungent and vile as a corpse decomposing in leafy grass, "than meet the same fate as Bardock and Vejitasei, blown to dust as easily as one-two-three." Vegeta yanked against the chains involuntarily, though his mouth gaped open even further when, with a cry, the woman leveled a slap against Zarbon's beryl, poreless skin.

Zarbon quickly rebuffed and sent her flying towards the bars of his cell, his own riposte imitating swatting a fly, but with the finesse and familiarity of an experienced sadist, and with that, he flung open the door and was gone, though Vegeta smelt the familiar ozone and heard the music of ki incinerating bodies that meant Zarbon was in a fine state and killing guards as he went.

First Turles, then Zarbon.

He had been forgotten.

He realized with an aching thrum in his jaw that he was gritting his teeth painfully. There was a pinching in his chest that he couldn't place, and he glanced down first at his chest, then at the woman, who slumped against the bars to his cell, breathing shallowly.

After a minute, with great difficulty, she sat up, pressing her face against the bars, which already blossomed with new bruises over the ones which had finally begun to pale.

He watched her suck in air through her teeth and sit up straight before knocking her head against the bar behind it. She clenched her teeth around a sob which never escaped.

"I have a plan," she told him finally, turning her head fractionally to regard the tormented darkness where he loitered.

He would not be forgotten yet.

"Tell me," he grated, and inside him the predator's cheshire grin gleamed.


End file.
